News by Wire: A Civil War Timeline from Lincoln's Telegraph Office

Lincoln's Window on the War

1On the second floor of the War Department building, next door to the White House, telegraph operators decoded messages that raced in over wires from the armies. President Abraham Lincoln walked over almost every day, often late at night, to read the news as it arrived. For the first time, a President could follow distant battles within hours.

2When the war began in April 1861, many people on both sides expected it to end in a few months. In July 1861 the two armies met near Bull Run, a creek in northern Virginia. Some people rode out from Washington with picnic baskets to watch. By evening, Confederate troops had driven the Union army back toward the capital, and the spectators fled with the retreating soldiers. The North had a larger population and far more factories and railroads. The South was fighting on its own ground, and to win it only had to defend itself until the North gave up.

3In 1862 the war grew more deadly and more modern. In March two ironclad warships, the Union's Monitor and the Confederacy's Virginia, fought for hours off the coast of Virginia; neither could sink the other. In April, at Shiloh in Tennessee, Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant won a two-day battle in which about 23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or missing.

4On January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, and Black men could now join the Union army. In early July, at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, Union troops turned back General Robert E. Lee's invasion of the North. Lee's army never again invaded the North. Later that month the 54th Massachusetts, a Black regiment, led an attack on Fort Wagner in South Carolina. The attack failed and many of its men fell, but Northern newspapers reported their courage, and many Northerners who had doubted that Black soldiers would fight changed their minds. That November, Lincoln dedicated a cemetery at Gettysburg, saying the nation would have "a new birth of freedom."

5By the summer of 1864 many Northerners were tired of the war, and Lincoln privately expected to lose that fall's election. In early September, General William T. Sherman's army captured Atlanta, a Confederate railroad center, and Sherman sent the news by telegram. In November his army began marching across Georgia to the sea, wrecking railroads and taking or destroying crops and livestock. Many white Georgians remembered the march as a time of ruin. Thousands of enslaved people left the plantations and followed the army toward freedom.

6Lincoln worried that the Emancipation Proclamation, a wartime order that covered only areas in rebellion, might not hold up once the war ended. He pressed Congress for an amendment ending slavery everywhere in the nation. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, and Grant let Lee's soldiers go home with their horses and mules. Five days later Lincoln was shot at a Washington theater, and he died the next morning. Historians estimate that between 620,000 and 750,000 soldiers died in the war.